Return possible for Oakland nurse whose deportation split...

1of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez watches the scenery flash by as she and a few family members drive from their small town of Santa Monica to the outer limits of Mexico City to check on a property Sept. 27, 2017 in Hidalgo, Mexico.Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

2of 24Before they leave for Mexico from San Francisco International Airport on Aug. 16, 2017, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez says her final words of goodbye to her daughter Melin, 21, as her husband Eusebio tries to keep his composure. The family's application for a stay was denied.Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

3of 24Vianney Sanchez, 23, left, comforts her mother Maria Mendoza-Sanchez after a meeting the family had with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., at the Sanchez home in Oakland on August 10, 2017, as siblings, from left, Melin Sanchez, 21, Elizabeth Sanchez, 16, and Jesus Sanchez, 12 look on.Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

4of 24Mendoza-Sanchez chats with her niece Ariana Sanchez and Sanchez’s children during a visit to check in on Mendoza-Sanchez’s property near Mexico City in September 2017.Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

5of 24Melin Sanchez lays her head on the dining room table on top of a magazine that is addressed to her mother in her family home in Oakland as she and her sisters video chat with their mother, Maria Mendoza Sanchez, from Maria's mother's home in Mexico. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

6of 24Jesus Sanchez takes in the view of Pachuca during a tour of the state of Hidalgo, Mexico. Unhappy in Mexico and unable to settle into his new life, Jesus returned home in October to live with his sisters, eliciting a promise from his mother that she wouldn't be sad without him. She wept when he boarded his flight home. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

7of 24Jesus Sanchez leans on his mother, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, as they video chat with his sisters back in Oakland.Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

8of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez rinses a rag in a concrete washbasin behind her mother's home while doing chores around the house. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

9of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez video chats with her daughters as her husband, Eusebio, sleeps next to her in their room — which is normally Maria's mother's room. The deportation has put a strain on their relationship. Eusebio lives with his elderly parents and spends his days caring for them and their livestock and running errands for relatives. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

10of 24Jesus Sanchez lies across chairs at the end of a family christening party.Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

11of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez chats with her niece Ariana Sanchez and Ariana's children Jade (left), 7, and Ambar, 9. Mendoza-Sanchez was checking in on her property and taking care of related paperwork near Mexico City. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

12of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez gently touches her 12-year-old son Jesus on the chin while talking to him about the food he didn't finish during a government tour given to the Chronicle of various sights around Hidalgo, Mexico. Maria says that Jesus is a selective eater and had trouble adjusting to the food in Mexico. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

13of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez sits with family members and most of the neighborhood, including Paulina Vilchis (right), in a government office while trying to sort out paperwork relating to property she and her husband own near Mexico City. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

14of 24Jesus Sanchez (right) sits next to his cousin Francisco Mejia, 13, as they listen to the teacher read literature at school in Santa Monica, Mexico. Jesus was accustomed to getting high marks in Oakland, but he struggled in Mexico because Spanish is not his first language and the teacher is much more strict than U.S. teachers are allowed to be.Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

15of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez leans on her husband, Eusebio, during a family christening party near Santa Monica, Mexico. Maria says family gatherings are bittersweet because she's never met many of her relatives, and the gatherings remind her that she's separated from her children.Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

16of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez lies on a chair and stares at the ceiling of her mother's home as a rainstorm keeps the internet and phone service from working, cutting off communication with her daughters in California. The phone service is very unreliable in the small town Maria now lives in, and even weather as seemingly benign as high winds can take out the home's internet connection.Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

18of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez watches the scenery flash by as she and a few family members drive from their small town of Santa Monica, Mexico, to the outer limits of Mexico City to check on a property elsewhere in her home state of Hidalgo.Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

19of 24Melin Sanchez helps her father, Eusebio, pack the car by handing him luggage through a window of their home in Oakland, California. The family's application for an eleventh-hour stay of the order to leave the country was denied. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

20of 24Eusebio Sanchez (left) helps his mother, Guadalupe Mejia Sanchez, 78, and his father herd their sheep home after taking them out to graze in Santa Monica, Mexico. Photo: Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle

21of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez lays on a chair, staring at the ceiling of her mother's home as rain falls unrelenting outside, keeping the internet and phone service from working, cutting her off from communication with her daughters Oct. 1, 2017 in Santa Monica, Hidalgo, Mexico. The phone service is very unreliable in the small town Maria now lives in and weather even as benign as high winds can take out the home's internet connection, cutting them off from the outside world.Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle

22of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez holds her daughter Elizabeth while standing next to her daughters Vianney, left, and Melin, right, on a trip to Tracey in 2002.Photo: Handout, Courtesy the Mendoza-Sanchez family

23of 24Maria Mendoza-Sanchez watches the scenery flash by as she and a few family members drive from their small town of Santa Monica to the outer limits of Mexico City to check on a property Sept. 27, 2017 in Hidalgo, Mexico.Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

24of 24Vianney Sanchez comforts her mother, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, after a meeting the family had with Dianne Feinstein in 2017.Photo: Photos by Leah Millis / The Chronicle 2017

A woman whose case drew national attention last year when immigration officials tore her from her children and her job as a nurse in Oakland and deported her to Mexico has a chance to beat the odds and return to the Bay Area, thanks to a lottery drawing and a recommendation from a U.S. consular officer.

The final decision, though, is in the hands of a Trump administration immigration agency. The agency made a preliminary decision in the woman’s favor last month, but the administration has taken a hard line on undocumented immigrants.

The woman, Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, has “become Exhibit A in the California-vs.-Trump immigration front lines,” said her immigration lawyer, Camiel Becker of Oakland.

Mendoza-Sanchez, whose story has been covered extensively by The Chronicle, had crossed the border in 1994 without a visa to join her husband, who had entered five years earlier. She obtained work permits in the early 2000s, studied nursing at City College of San Francisco and Holy Names University in Oakland, and worked night shifts as a nurse’s assistant to support her family. The training paid off in 2015 when she landed a six-figure job as an oncology nurse at the Highland Hospital trauma center.

The couple had been applying for legal status since 2002, under a law protecting parents whose U.S.-born children would suffer exceptional hardships from their deportation. An immigration judge found them ineligible in 2013 and ordered them deported. But President Barack Obama’s administration granted them two one-year stays, then adopted rules that focused on deporting criminals and allowed the couple to remain in the U.S., renewing their work permits every six months.

That all changed with President Trump’s election. He promptly signed an executive order making virtually every undocumented immigrant a priority for removal. By August 2017, Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband, Eusebio Sanchez, were on a plane for Mexico.

They left behind three daughters, two of them native-born U.S. citizens and the third, Vianney, who was then 23 and a “childhood arrival” protected from deportation under a program Trump is trying to repeal.

Because young children need to be with their parents, Mendoza-Sanchez said, the couple brought a fourth child, their then-12-year-old son, Jesus, to live with them in a village south of Mexico City where Mendoza-Sanchez was born and raised. But two months later, the unfamiliar surroundings and school system there were too much, Mendoza-Sanchez said.

With the child ailing and depressed, “I had to send him back to California” to rejoin his sisters, his mother said.

Jesus and his two U.S.-born sisters, Melin and Elizabeth, have visited their parents once or twice, then returned to Oakland where Vianney looks after them. Sometimes they have brief phone conversations with their mother. For her, that’s not enough.

“It has been way more difficult than I thought at the beginning,” Mendoza-Sanchez, 47, said by phone Wednesday from Mexico. “I thought I was bearing up. I did get very depressed. ... I don’t know how to live without the kids.”

She also misses her work with cancer patients.

“I do not consider it a job, I consider it a privilege,” she said. “The feeling that comes when I see patients getting better, it’s a beautiful feeling.”

The feeling is apparently mutual. As she and her husband were about to be deported last year, hundreds of nurses, doctors, union members and other supporters, including the head of the public health authority that operates Highland Hospital, held a protest rally outside the facility, some waving signs that read, “Hands Off Maria.”

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said she was thinking of Mendoza-Sanchez and her abrupt removal after more than two decades of living in and contributing to the community when she warned immigrants in February of an impending raid by federal agents, provoking fury from Trump.

“Oakland is full of Marias,” Schaaf said.

Despite the Trump administration’s immigration policy, though, there’s still a chance for deportees to return legally, with skill and luck. Mendoza-Sanchez caught a break in April when her name was one of about 65,000, out of 200,000 applicants, drawn in the H-1B visa lottery, which allows foreigners to apply for six-year work permits. Highland Hospital sponsored her application — “sent off with a prayer,” in the words of Becker, her immigration lawyer.

Also in the cheering section was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who had objected to Mendoza-Sanchez’s deportation and sponsored a bill that would have allowed her to return. The bill had no chance of passage in a Republican Congress, but collected nearly 100,000 signatures of support online.

“I’m proud to support her H-1B application that will allow her to reunite with her children and return to her nursing job, which the hospital has been unable to fill,” Feinstein said in a statement this week.

Mendoza-Sanchez was still ineligible for a visa through normal channels, Becker said, because she had entered the U.S. illegally in 1994 with her newborn daughter — technically “alien smuggling” — and had been deported. But the government can grant waivers to skilled workers, and Mendoza-Sanchez is most of the way there.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services found her legally eligible on Oct. 2 without even asking for evidence — “miracle No. 2,” as Becker put it. The next stop was the State Department’s consular office in Mexico City, where, he said, her legal team handed over a packet of materials that included testimonials to Mendoza-Sanchez’s skills and the need for her services, and the volumes of media coverage. The team then presented her for an interview.

“It took much longer than I’ve ever heard of for this application process, but they came back and said they were recommending it for approval,” the attorney said.

Now it’s back to Citizenship and Immigration Services for a final decision on the visa. Becker said the agency usually follows the consular office recommendations, so Mendoza-Sanchez is “cautiously optimistic.” On the other hand, Customs and Immigration Services is part of the Department of Homeland Security, a vigorous participant in Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Bob Egelko has been a reporter since June 1970. He spent 30 years with the Associated Press, covering news, politics and occasionally sports in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and legal affairs in San Francisco from 1984 onward. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner for five months in 2000, then joined The Chronicle in November 2000.

His beat includes state and federal courts in California, the Supreme Court and the State Bar. He has a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and is a member of the bar. Coverage has included the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the appointment of Rose Bird to the state Supreme Court and her removal by the voters, the death penalty in California and the battles over gay rights and same-sex marriage.